1991—Sonic
the Hedgehog
As fans of the Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles, my sister and I temporarily subscribed (our parents did, anyway)
to a magazine that was dedicated to those famous four turtle brothers in a
half-shell. :D It had to be, I dunno, maybe winter or spring
of 1991, that in this magazine there was a page or two about video games coming
up, and one of them was the very first Sonic the
Hedgehog. There was at least one little screenshot of
the video game. It was a tiny picture,
one that my six-and-a-half year old eyes could see very well, and I saw a blue
character with red shoes trying to keep balance on the edge of the cliff and
trying not to fall off. I don’t know
what came over me; I could not stop staring at the picture. Who is this little thing? I forgot if I saw the title of the game, but
even if I did, I never knew what a hedgehog was. It was the first time I ever came across that
word, and little did I know that we were about to have our young gaming lives changed
forever…
Our parents had a friend who
hosted a pool party summer that same year.
We went along with them because other kids would be there too. We of course ate first, and then a little
while later we were in our swimsuits in the swimming pool. It wasn’t the first
time we were in a swimming pool; we had relatives in Canada we visited two
years ago who had a pool too. So we had
a lot of fun in the swimming pool, needless to say. But I gotta say, too…I think after we got out
of the pool, we never went back in.
Because after we got out and wrapped ourselves in towels, we stepped
into the house and spotted some kids crowded around a TV set. One of them was playing Sonic the Hedgehog.
All we could do was just stand
there, in our swimsuits and towels, and watch the game—watch the blue hedgehog
run across the screen and jump and attack the robots with animals in them, and
run and run some more, running in loop-de-loops and helixes and grassy moving
platforms. If there is one phrase I can
use to describe this experience, it was “love at first sight.”
So this blue thing’s name is
Sonic and he’s a hedgehog, huh? That was
neat! It was—it was better than Super Mario Brothers—and just the
previous year we got the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Mario Brothers for our sixth birthday! Yeah okay, Mario and Luigi run from left to
right too, but…Sonic did the same thing and was freakin’ ten times faster! And the colors were so vivid and the graphics
so rich. The video game music sounded way better to us
than the 8-bit music for Nintento.
Our dad was talking to one of the
other adults. I went to them and, with a
feeling of guilt (I felt like I was asking the world, though I know Dad didn’t
think I was), I asked them, “Can, can I play, the Sunik the Hetchog game?” The other man repeated “’Sonic
Hedgehog?’” And then I guess from what I
remember, Dad explained what it was. He
may have seen that my sister and I were watching. Maybe that’s how they knew we liked this
amazing thing.
I think later after that was when
my sister got a chance to play soon after.
One kid soon said, “Watch out.
There’s a bad guy at the end.”
That kid was referring to the main villain Dr. Robotnik, and back then
we didn’t know the name of the villain.
I didn’t get a chance to play the game back then, but still, the fact
that we were watching or somehow experiencing Sonic the Hedgehog being played live was astonishing. It was that blue guy in the TMNT magazine that I stared at for some
minutes before moving on in the magazine.
So
that’s where my history of being a Sonic fan-girl began, and it gets better…
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